visiting the manongs in a convalescent home in delano by Joseph Legaspi

Those mountains, ocher in the distance,
resemble the wrinkled skins
of the manongs from Delano,
a town north of Bakersfield that smells
like the first rain after a drought, the pungent
collision of earth-dryness and sky-wetness.

The fields near the highways are packed
with rows upon rows of sweet melons and sprouts.
Filipino migrant workers picked them
for cents: winter peas, oranges, bushels of apples.
Their backs arched like bent bamboos
found in Philippine provinces.

Santa Maria. Barstow. Salinas.
Fresno. Seattle. Juneau.
The west is too familiar
to these lonely, old men trapped in their rooms
filled with photographs of white girls
they had loved but cannot marry.
Each told the story of the collective,
the many eyes of a single pineapple:
I came to America at sixteen, at fourteen,
at twelve, aboard a dysenteried ship...

Looking at the east, shunned by the west,
they wander as ghosts in-between worlds, haunting,
and yet haunted by their own ghosts,
the white membranes over their eyes like sadness.
This is all we know, said the manongs,
To harvest grapes, you must destroy the vines.